Major Books of 2023: Non-Fiction

Anything written or produced in the media that makes an honest effort to provide information solely about the real world—without resorting to fiction—is considered non-fiction. The general goal of non-fiction is to present subjects in an unbiased manner using data from science, history, and empirical sources. But some non-fiction crosses the line into more subjective realms, expressing sincere beliefs about actual issues.

In addition to being able to compare and contrast, classify, categorize, and summarize information, non-fiction writers can also demonstrate the causes and effects of events, arrange facts logically or chronologically, draw conclusions about the facts, and more.

A Living Remedy (by Nicole Chung)

In this memoir, an adopted daughter wrestles with grief, loss, and regret. Growing up in rural Oregon, Chung was isolated as the Korean- American daughter of white parents, who lived paycheck to paycheck. Many years later, after finding a community living in Berlin, life begins anew when she first discovers Moon, a dreamy K- pop superstar. Soon enough, she's overpowered by fervent devotion, penning fanfiction in which "Y/N" (your name) imagines her way into romantic encounters with her boy band hero. When Moon abruptly retires, our narrator travels to Seoul to find him, making for a madcap journey of self-destruction and self-discovery. Haunting yet playful, immersive yet unreal, Y/N is a brilliant dissection of consumption in all its forms-how we consume art, and how it consumes us. And a home on the East Coast, Chung suffered two devastating blows: within two years, she lost her father to kidney disease and her mother to cancer. A Living Remedy recounts the agony of watching them grapple with their health amid financial instability and a dysfunctional healthcare system. Chung describes her father's death as "negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state's failure to fulfil its most basic responsibilities to him and others like him."

Ambedkar: A Life (by Shashi Tharoor)

In this new biography, Tharoor tells Ambedkar’s story with great lucidity. Insight, and admiration. He traces the arc of the great man's life from his birth into a family of Mahars in the Bombay Presidency on 14 April 1891 to his death in Delhi on 6 December 1956.  He describes the many humiliations and hurdles Ambedkar had to overcome in a society that stigmatized the community he was born into and the single- minded determination with which he overcame every obstacle he encountered.

A Walk Up The Hill: Living with People and Nature (by Madhav Gadgil)

Gadgil’s memoir A Walk UpThe Hill: Living with People and Nature, is a repository of information about how India’s battle for safeguarding ecology was won and lost. It is also a life lived on his terms.

Gadgil is among the first Indian ecologists trained in Harvard and influenced by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Carson’s book led to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Gadgil’s work has influenced environmental norms across India. Including the Biological Diversity Act. One of his first forays into planning was with the Karnataka State Board for Wildlife, 1976-82. Over the years, his key contribution includes the People’s Biodiversity Register, which incorporates locally sourced information for understanding and managing biodiversity. He was also one of the founders of the Center for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You (by Lucinda Williams)

The iconic singer- songwriter and three-time Grammy winner  opens up about  her traumatic childhood in the Deep South, her years of being overlooked in the music industry, and the stories that inspired her enduring songs in this bracingly can did memoir.

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (by Naomi Klein)

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humour and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Drama Free (by Nedra Glover Tawwab)

From the bestselling author of Set  Boundaries, Find Peace, a road map for understanding and moving past family struggles and living your life, your way. This clear and compassionate guide will help you take control of your own life - and honour the person you truly are.

Elon Musk (by Walter Isaacson)

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done

Walter Isaacson charts Elon Musk's journey from humble beginnings to one of the wealthiest people on the planet is Musk a genius or a jerk? From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence.

Gaslighting Recovery for Women (by Amelia Kelley)

PhD In Gas lighting Recovery for Women, trauma - informed therapist Amelia Kelley, Ph. D., offers evidence–based therapy and tools to help women detect and protect themselves from manipulation that can occur in all key areas of life family, intima relationships, work, academia, and healthcare. Her guided approach to healing from abuse helps survivors establish a greater sense of self- worth, self-esteem, and empowerment.

Glossy: Ambiton, Beauty and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier (by Marisa Meltzer)

This book recounts the millennial makeup company’s rise and unglamorous plateau. Glossier’s success was fueled by the entrepreneurial savvy of its founder, Weiss, who transformed it into a rare billion-dollar company helmed by a woman.

King A Life (by Jonathan Eig)

Jonathan Eig’s book on Martin Luther King Jr. is the first biography of the civil rights icon in decades. It’s a refreshing portrait of King, offering an intimate look inside the life of a man whose Massive contributions to American history are known but whose emotional complexities are less so. Eig digs into everything’s family origins, his relationship with his wife, and the pressures he faced from being so influential so early in his career to create a portrait of the late activist that captures the dynamic and flawed human that he was. It’s a deftly researched and highly accessible account of a leader and a new view into the many overlooked parts of King’s story.

Life in Five Senses (by Gretchen Rubin)

The #1 New York Times best selling author of The  Happiness Project discovers a surprising path to a life of more energy, creativity luck, and love: by tuning in to the five senses.

Little Daymond Learns to Earn (by Daymond John)

Entrepreneur, FUBU founder, and Shark Tank fan fave Daymond John introduces kids to basic ideas about money and starting their own business in this accessible picture book!

My Name is Barbra (by Barbra Streisand)

Barbra Streisand’s account of extraordinary fame covers her youth in Brooklyn her political activism to her dazzling leaps between stage and screen.

Palo Alto (by Malcolm Harris)

Billed as “the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, “ Palo Alto lives up to its description, but it’s also so much more- in these whopping  720 pages, you’ll find nothing short of a history of capitalism. Harris deftly charts the long shadow of extraction in Northern California, from settler colonialism to robber barons to counterculture capitalists. The rapacious greed of today’s Silicon Valley, he argues. It is the product of 150 years of damning local history. A monumental work of research and imagination.

Pathogenesis (by Dr Jonathan Kennedy)

The book argues that germs have done more to shape humanity than even the most prominent people and leaders; it uses eight plagues to demonstrate this, including the Black Death and a series of Roman Empire pandemics.

Poverty by America (by Matthew Desmond)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted returns with another paradigm-shifting inquiry into America’s dark heart. This time, Desmond asks: how does the United States, the world’s richest nation, have more poverty than any other advanced democracy?

Poverty, America, argues that poverty persists because the financially secure benefit from it, with landlords, banks, corporations, and politicians all reaping staggering gains from overcharging and underserving Americans in need. Desmond advances a fierce argument: that alongside “aggressive, uncompromising antipoverty reforms, “it would take just $177 billion to end hunger and homelessness in America.

Quietly Hostile (by Samantha Lrby)

A hilarious new essay collection from Samantha Lrby engages readers with her characteristic combination of laugh-out-loud moments, heartfelt passages and plenty of awkward experiences.

Saving Time (by Jenny Odell)

The visionary author of How to Do Nothing returns to challenge the notion that “time is money.” In this hopeful and subversive cultural history, Odell traces the origins of our market-based understanding of time, arguing that how we organize our days has always been “a history of extraction, whether of resources from the earth or of labour time from people.” Odell’s research is rigorous, but Saving Time’s real triumph lies in her road map for experiencing time outside the capitalist clock. Instead of “hoarding” time, we should “garden” it, attuning ourselves to the natural world and prioritizing meaningful human connections.

Smoke and Ashes (by Amitav Ghosh)

This book is like a treasure trove hidden at the bottom of an ocean. As Amitav Ghosh pens down the history of opium in the Indian subcontinent and the world, we open our eyes to an alternate history that has been hidden for so long. We get to know how opium was and still is, the driving force behind some of the biggest empires, conglomerates and families. But, that is not all, he also makes a shocking discovery that if it were not for the opium trade, the Britishers would not have been able to rule us that long.

Spare (by Prince Harry)

The Duke of Sussex Prince Harry tells his own story, chronicling his journey with raw, unflinching honesty. A landmark publication, Spare is full of insight, revelation, self- examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.

The Crooked Timber of New India: Essays on a Republic in Crisis (by Parakala Prabhakar)

The Crooked Timber of New India is a collection of hard-hitting essays on the state of today’s India, which constitute a sharply critical report card on the performance of the Modi government. Parakala Prabhakar is a widely respected political economist, writer and social commentator who happens to be the husband of  Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. In this book, he tackles a wide range of issues ranging from the rise to power of the BJP to the now withdrawn farm laws. However, there is a thread that persists, and that is the pernicious effect on India of the dispensation that governs the country presently. Substantiating arguments with facts, Prabhakar notes that for the first time since the 1990s, the number of people who are below the poverty line in India has increased. The book argues that the country added 75 million to the world poor in 2021 alone, and slipped to the 132^nd position (out of 191 countries) in the UNDP Global Human Development Index for 2021-22.

The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (by Professor Peter Frankopan)

In The Earth Transformed, Peter Frankopan, one of the world’s leading historians, shows that the natural environment is a crucial, if not the defining, factor in global history and not just of humankind. Volcanic eruptions, solar activities, atmospheric, oceanic and other shifts, as well as anthropogenic behaviour, are fundamental parts of the past and the present. In this magnificent and groundbreaking book, we learn about the origins of our species: about the development of religion and language and their relationships with the origins of the bureaucratic state; about how growing demands for harvests resulted in the increased shipment of enslaved peoples; about how efforts to understand and manipulate the weather have a long and deep history.

The Half-Known Life (by Pico Lyer)

Does paradise exist?

The question is at the centre of Pico Lyer’s dazzling new work of nonfiction, which examines the many ways different cultures search for purposeful existence and the paradoxical struggle for peace in a violent and fractured world. From Japan’s mountain temples to the streets of Belfast, layer wonders where utopia begins and how we can access it. In doing so, he suggests that paradise may not be a destination, but instead a journey.

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (by Jeff Goodell)

In his fast-paced new book about the extreme heat caused by climate change, Goodell shows how even the most privileged among us will struggle with the cascading catastrophes- rising seas, crop failures, and social unrest generated by the deadly heat.

The Indian Metropolis (by Varun Gandhi)

The thought-provoking book is like an open debate about the real scenes bugging urban India. As a politician and an Indian, Varun Gandhi, aptly questions our development models that simply ape the West but have no human touch to it. He shows us that there are downsides to it and provides solutions as well.

The Less You Preach, The More You Learn: Aphorisms for Our Age (by Shashi Tharoor and Joseph Zacharias)

In this book, Shashi Tharoor and Joseph Zacharias have coined over 200 aphorisms on practically every aspect of modern life. Wise, witty, and memorable, the aphorisms in The Less You Preach, The More You Learn provoke, stimulate, and entertain.

The Real Work (by Adam Gopnik)

How we learn new skills. To explore this, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik apprenticed himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor to try his late- middle-age hand at things he assumed were beyond him. It’s as rib-tickling as it is uplifting.

The Wager (by David Grann)

The titular ship was a British vessel that washed ashore in Brazil after embarking on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. Grann’s retelling zhuzhes up historical facts with fresh, salt-sprayed insight.

To Infinity and Beyond (by Neil de Grasse Tyson (Author), Lindsey Nyx Walker)

Linked to a special mini-season of the award-winning StarTalk podcast, this enlightening illustrated narrative by the world’s most celebrated astrophysicist explains the universe from the solar system to the farthest reaches of space with authority and humor. The book begins as we leave Earth, encountering new truths about our planet’s atmosphere, the nature of sunlight, and the many missions that have demystified our galactic neighbors. But the farther out we travel, the weirder things get. What’s void and what’s a vacuum? How can light be a wave and a

particle at the same time? When we finally arrive at the blackness of outer space, Tyson takes on the spookiest phenomena of the cosmos: parallel worlds, black holes, time travel, and more. For science junkies and fans of the conundrums that astrophysicists often ponder, To Infinity and beyond is an enlightening adventure into the farthest reaches of the cosmos.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth about What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters (by Oliver Franklin-Wallis)

The journeying journalist bravely dives headlong into the grimy world of landfills and littering, travelling from African dumps to the murky waters of London’s sewer system – meeting campaigners and waste- pickers along his rubbish-strewn way.

1947-1957, India: The Birth of a Republic (by Chandrachur Ghose)

The first decade after India’s independence, 1947-1957, was probably the most crucial in the nation’s history Opening a window to this period, this book weaves a story out of the complex ideas and events that have largely remained beneath the surface of public discourse. The transfer of power, the framing of the constitution and the formation of the governance machinery; the clash of ideas and ideologies among parties and personalities; the beginning of the disintegration of the Congress and the consolidation of political forces in the opposition; Nehru’s grappling with existential problems at home and his quest for global peace; the interplay between democratic ideals and ruthless power play-all these factors impinged on each other and shaped the new republic in its formative decade. Thought-provoking, argumentative and unputdownable, 1947-1957, India: The Birth of a Republic is a must-read for anyone interested in Indian political history.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful (by Maggie Smith)

Poet Maggie Smith’s story of rebuilding a life when all seems shattered. Tackling the devastation of a broken marriage and the healing journey of rebuilding her life, Maggie Smith’s memoir echoes the gorgeous lines from her poem Good Bones: This place could be beautiful, / right? You could make this place beautiful.”